The past month or two I've been addicted to Facebook. I joined Facebook some time around Christmas, after realizing virtually everyone younger than me used this tool and "Friended" each other on Facebook in order to stay connected. Facebook defines itself as "a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them." It really is an incredibly useful tool. For example, I never need send out updated address, phone, and e-mail information to anyone who is a friend on Facebook. They can look all those details up on Facebook through a profile I'm responsible for updating, or they can send me a message anytime without knowing my e-mail address because they are connected to me as a friend.

I'm not an expert in postmodern culture. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a tool like Facebook is part of a milieu--maybe also including cell phones and instant messaging--that has dramatically transformed how (young) humans interact and socialize. I'll leave it to the philosophers whether this is an ontological or a phenomenological transformation. What I do know is that it has transformed how I do ministry with young adults and high school youth.

Just a couple of examples. We have a high school group traveling to Boston this summer for a mission trip with Youthworks. Twenty youth and three adults. All of the youth are on Facebook, and we created a "group" so that updates and questions can be easily distributed to the whole group as necessary. I used to do this with e-mail. Kids didn't read e-mail. Group e-mail lists never worked. But they all read messages that come through on Facebook. Recently, they all voted in quick succession that we should stop in Niagara Falls on the way home.

Additionally, youth groups from other churches that will be at our site the same week also joined the group, and they can all communicate before we arrive on site. Socializing for this generation is more porous and less reliant on face to face interaction. They can get to know each other at a distance, and can then maintain friendships years, even decades later, by phone and computer. Of course, I do the same thing as a thirty-five year old, but it is not as native.

Another example. It was like pulling teeth getting our high school seniors to reply by postcard as to whether they would be present for our senior blessing during worship this year. Postcards sit in a pile along with all the other mail in many people's homes. But a quick note out on Facebook confirmed a) that they were coming, b) that they wanted to go out for brunch afterward, and c) details on where they're studying next year and what their summer jobs are. Similarly, I can stay in touch with our college age youth and young adults and communicate back and forth much more quickly and openly than via other media.

On a personal note, my brother and I instant message much more often than we communicate by any other medium. He is fourteen years my junior. We've had some profound conversations on AIM, conversations I doubt would have happened face to face.

I do lament some aspects of the new technology. For example, when I read collections of letters of yesteryear, I am stunned by their depth and profundity. Just think of the letter exchanges between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, John and Abigail Adams, Flannery O'Connor's Habit of Being, or the vast collection of letters by Philip Melanchthon, which fill the first 28 volumes of the Corpus Reformatorum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Reformatorum).

I remember when I first started doing e-mail back in 1991, my first year of college. A friend at Iowa State University helped me set up an e-mail account. This was very early in the e-mail days, and very few people sent e-mail messages. It was a novelty. In order to successfully send an e-mail, you needed to know a person's e-mail address. You also needed to know the routing code to route the e-mail out of your server and through other servers into the host server of the institution at which your friend was a student. I think the e-mail address for my friend was over 100 characters long.

In those early days, I wrote really long e-mail messages, often as long as this column. We would write letters at the level of detail you'd expect in a paper letter. But over time, I (we all) adapted to the technology, realizing that you could send very brief details, even single word or single letter e-mails, and get a quick if not immediate response. The end result--very short e-mails, often perfunctory, with all salutations and other habitually polite formulations elided. Messages on Facebook are generally just as short.

I think technologies like Facebook have also contributed to a more fluid sense of commitment and responsibility. Prior to the advent of such technologies, once you committed to showing up for a meeting, you probably showed up. There was no way to back out last minute. With Facebook, when you are invited to an event, you can always click on Yes, No, or Maybe, and then change your status last minute as desired. Facebook functions well for communication--it functions less well as a measure for gauging who will show up when and for what. And often, it can also serve as proxy for real face time. Once you've accomplished a bit of business or communicated something, the desire to actually get together is lessened. The computer stands in for--but only in a diminished sense--the new community. One can have hundreds, even thousands, of "friends" on Facebook, but any sense of depth in that "friendiness" probably pales in comparison to the friendships at least some of us exercise in our daily lives with others, and the friendship we know in Jesus Christ, who has called us friends (John 15:13). 

And although our book of faces may be full to overflowing, it is still the deepest fulfillment of the Christian life that we, like Moses, might speak face to face with God as one speaks to a friend (Exodus 33:11). Maybe reminding myself of that will cure me of my Facebook addiction. Maybe this column will invite at least a few, on the other hand, to consider the ways that God as friend can be communicated by those who minister in Christ's name in these new technological milieus.

p.s. It is May, and I had wanted to write a column with summer book suggestions. If anyone responds in the affirmative in the comments section, I'll send in an additional column with my top ten books for summer 2008.